More Human Than Human

I'm still marvelling five days later at how brilliant the new 'Final Cut' of Blade Runner is. This new version is only playing onscreen in New York and LA, and I was dreading having to watch it at one of the Times Square tackyplexes, but lo and behold, Warner Brothers took the high road and booked the Ziegfeld, my home away from home. The 10:30 opening night show was packed with geeks that applauded each name in the opening credits to varying degrees, eventually making a joke of praising any name that popped up, but then the place erupted with Ridley Scott's credit. A far cry from when I walked out of my first BR viewing in 1982 at the Sunrise Mall in Massapequa hearing disappointed viewers muttering, "That sucked."

To say the digital presentation is good is doing it a disservice. I was expecting a great image, but instead I was floored with the amount of detail in the opening cityscape shots. I could for the first time see the Tyrell pyramids in the distance in the second or third shot, long before the closer shots. It made me recall seeing Siskel and Ebert discuss viewing the Criterion laserdisc version of the film rather than VHS, Roger practically begging viewers to get up and buy an LD player immediately. The image throughout is outstanding, and there are visual tweaks that readjust the editing to better effect, such as the first shots of Batty that had been cribbed from later in the film that now have the incorrect backgrounds wiped out and replaced with the correct scenery, or the much-too-obvious stuntwoman-with-bad-wig inserts in the scene where Zhora crashes through the plate glass. I'd even swear Scott did some tightening along the way, but without a side-by-side comparison, it's hard to tell. Other FX work was done, wire removal and such, and the result is a more enjoyable visual experience.

For the first time, however, this movie really hit me on a gut level. The android replicants live in fear that at some moment they may just fall down dead due to their limited lifespan, but they don't have any idea when they'll reach the end because they don't know when they were incubated. Their emotions are self-generated and erratic and whereas I'd previously seen them as villains, it's not difficult to see them as sympathetic. They're just like us, they don't want to die, and their quest to find out how to live longer is thwarted at every turn. They can do amazing things, superhuman things, but they're doomed and completely vulnerable. In pursuit is Deckard, a cop who is the best at tracking and killing trespassing replicants but lives just like them, surrounded by old photographs from a past long gone. Deckard falls in love with a replicant and the film even posits the idea (even more so than the previous revision in 1992) that Deckard is a replicant himself. Deckard watches Batty expire after they've tried to kill each other, a death that comes with Batty recalling for Deckard the wonderful things he's seen that humans have never known and now will be lost forever. These ideas of living in fear of death and of all you are vanishing with your death were mostly lost on audiences in 1982, myself included, and are very mature themes for what most people thought would be just be a futuristic action film with Han Solo and flying cars. The script is tight, very economical and smart, and it may be heresy to say so, but this is one adaptation that's much better than the original book.

If you have the opportunity, you should see this on the big screen. It's playing until the 18th at The Ziegfeld in NY and at The Landmark in LA. After that, it will hit DVD, BluRay and HD-DVD on December 18th. AV hardware manufacturers like to have big software titles to drive sales, and I can imagine this release having a big impact on both HD optical disc formats.